1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of cooking devices respectively having reservoirs of cooking oil used for accomplishing the cooking process in one fashion or another and is particularly directed toward such devices which do not depend upon the items of food being submerged in the cooking oil during the cooking process.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Cooking apparatus utilizing a reservoir of heated cooking oil is well known; however, the prior devices, by and large, depend on the items of food being submerged in the fat or hot cooking oil. Obviously, particles of the submerged food become separated from the piece as a whole which causes numerous problems. One of these problems is the particles become overcooked or are burned to a crisp which adversely affects the flavor of food subsequently cooked in the hot grease. Numerous patents have been granted for various attempts at solving this particular problem, e.g., attempts have been made to filter the fat while other attempts have been made to cause the reservoir to continuously overflow as as to sweep from the fat those loose particles. However, none of the attempts known by the applicant is totally effective in preventing the old or used cooking oil from adversely affecting items of food subsequently cooked therein. Accordingly, the most effective approach at solving this problem is to frequently change the cooking oil or simply to discard the cooking oil after very little use. Obviously, this can be a rather costly approach in view of the ever-increasing cost of cooking oil and the like.
Due to the above-mentioned problem, among others, the typical housewife doesn't attempt to cook doughnuts or potato chips and the like which are usually submerged in deep fat during the cooking process. Therefore, these items of food are usually purchased from a grocery outlet with little or no assurance of their freshness which is a very important feature of these food items, i.e., stale doughnuts and soggy potato chips would rank high on a list comprising the most undesirable or unappetizing items of food.